“I’m loving your book, it’s proving very helpful in getting me up to speed on YWA. I noticed this morning that on page 90 there *might* be a mistake in the code example.” – James Dutton.

That’s a first, and not that I am surprised, but James found a mistake on page 90 in my Yahoo! Web Analytics Book – minor and repeated on the next page in correct form, BUT I still owe him a free Diet Coke in New York for pointing it out. Here is the section from the Book – I highlighted the error and added in the correct deployment syntax.

Tracking Products Viewed

I have been very focused on the nirvana of e-commerce actions, the sale, but I am sure you agree with me that there are many steps and many actions before getting to this point. You can track any number of steps and any number of activities with Yahoo! Web Analytics. The tool has a few hard-coded events, however, that come right out of the box—one of them is the unique action value called PRODUCT_VIEW. The Product View variable provides you with the opportunity to expand your merchandising knowledge to activities, very close to the top of the sales funnel. In this way, you can see how often potential customers view your products, which products are the most popular, and whether a positive connection exists between product campaigns and product views.

Remember that selling only provides you with successful customer behavior, whereas events before the sale occurs can provide you with very powerful insights on unsuccessful customer outcomes. The product view can be used in a number of ways, and you will even see some use of it as a proxy for products added to cart or sales (if they do not have volume enough to perform signifi cant campaign analysis on that parameter). To enable this type of tracking, you apply the value PRODUCT_VIEW to the ACTION variable on all the pages where you display products:

Version 4

var ACTION=’PRODUCT_VIEW’;
var _S_SKU=’DM112899’;

Version 5

YWATracker.setAmount(“PRODUCT_VIEW“); //Correct: YWATracker.setAction(“PRODUCT_VIEW“);
YWATracker.setSKU(“DM112899“);

The pages where this code is applied do not have to be unique and in fact rarely are. Products are displayed on product marketing pages, technical specification pages, in search results, in recommendation boxes—and I am sure you have even more suggestions. I recommend you enhance your document-naming and -grouping skills to create opportunities to split different product views over the site.

Which leads to our next topic: forwarding to pages where we display multiple products at the same time. A product search result is likely to do this, as shown in Figure 4.3

Figure 4.3.  -  Standard product search result page

There are other scenarios where this is bound to happen. In order to track several product views at the same time, continue using the same syntax we’ve discussed in previous chapters, separating variable values by a semicolon. Tracking two product views at the same time looks like this:

Version 4

var ACTION=’PRODUCT_VIEW’;
var _S_SKU=’DM112899;DM113834’;

Version 5

YWATracker.setAction(“PRODUCT_VIEW“);
YWATracker.setSKU(“DM112899;DM113834“);

If you are not sure which product views to track together, the default merchandising report, shown in Figure 4.4, is a good starting point for you to play around with the various dimensions and metrics.

Figure 4.4  –   Default merchandising summary report

Note that the report in Figure 4.4 and those from earlier include product naming and product categorization, which we are yet to talk about, and thus your reports will look different. However, you can view merchandising reporting and products on a SKU level, as shown in Figure 4.5. You only have this option, though, if you have not uploaded any merchandising information. If you proceed to the summary report, you will see the screen shown in Figure 4.5.

Figure 4.5   -  Viewing products by SKU

As I mentioned earlier, you can choose to view products by SKU to begin with and then associate product names and categorization later. Now, let’s move on to tracking products added to your cart.

…

Well, error corrected! :-)

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)